From the Ranch to the street

North County photographer captures lives of the homeless

Doing any book right ---- be it fiction or nonfiction ----
requires an enormous amount of research. While researching
"Multiple Wounds," I made several late-night trips to parts of
downtown San Diego that were well away from the restaurants and
nightlife, scoping out scenes for my novel. One image burned in my
consciousness, and I wrote it from my character's perspective: "The
way the homeless had been laid out along the sidewalks, cocooned
and unmoving, had reminded Cheever of body bags put out to be
collected."

Intellectually, I knew there were a lot of homeless people
living in downtown San Diego, but viscerally seeing all those
haunting bodies in the post-midnight shadows revealed just how
pervasive the situation was.

Rancho Santa Fe photojournalist Susan Lankford's "Downtown
U.S.A." (Humane Exposures Publishing, $29.95) is a
coffee-table-size book that deals with a non-coffee-table-size
subject: the homeless. Over the course of four years, Lankford
turned her lens on the homeless in downtown San Diego.

Lankford's introduction to the homeless began in 1991 when she
signed a one-month lease to rent out the old Seaport Village jail.
At the time she was doing commercial fashion photography, and liked
the jail's lighting. It didn't take long for Lankford to notice her
"neighbors" ---- the homeless squatting in and around the
facility.

Almost immediately her camera came out, and she started focusing
it on those neighbors. "I think there was an intuitive prophet
hanging over my head," she said during a recent interview. "The
photojournalist in me came out, and I just began taking
pictures."

Lankford's cast of characters soon followed, and she began
documenting the life of people such as Big Man, Papa Smurf, Jed,
Michael and Pep (full name: Salt and Pepper Sally, a mixed-breed
dog), Chuck, The Family and Mrs. Walton (to protect their
identities, Lankford used pseudonyms for everyone in her book). It
didn't take long before these individuals became much more to
Lankford than a study in photos. She even commissioned some of the
individuals to write about their lives (Michael's writings, in
particular, are found throughout her book). Often, Lankford became
the "go to" person when her subjects were incarcerated or having
familial, financial and personal turmoil.

What surprised Lankford more than anything else was that the
homeless she got to know were on the whole happy with their lives.
At the same time, she said that the better she came to know them,
the more she found "the side of them that didn't function."

Those who live on the streets are often categorized as either
"homeless" ---- people who would prefer to live indoors ---- or
"street people" ---- those who prefer to remain on the streets. For
some without homes, there is a certain brotherhood that comes with
living on the streets. James, one of Lankford's photographic
subjects, always bedded down for the night along with a number of
other sober acquaintances in a drug- and alcohol-free parking lot,
a situation belying the stereotype that all homeless are alcoholics
and addicts. (Lankford says she knows of many religious homeless
people who eschew drugs and alcohol.)